We have been heavily documenting the rise of Bing on this blog, and there’s no denying it has definitely improved Microsoft’s position in terms of search market share.

So now the question for website owners and SEO’ers remains – “How do I rank higher in Bing and drive more traffic to my website?”

While the jury is still out on definitive strategies for top ranking success in Bing, there seems to be a growing chorus of support for certain tactics, which I have detailed below:

Backlinks While backlinks are still used in the bing algorithm, it seems not to the same level as Google. Backlink counts for top 10 sites in Bing are much lower than Google, suggesting less importance.

Anchor Text It seems that Bing focuses more heavily on links with relevant anchor text, so that should influence your linking strategy – get your text anchor text right.

Onpage Optimization One of the more contensious factors, but many SEO experts believe Bing is weighting more heavily towards on-page optimization. Not sure this will remain the case, if in fact it is the case.

Age & Authority It appears that Bing places a higher weighting on site/domain age and authority than Google. Again a factor that is surely not sustainable given the importance of social media and blogs in terms of relevant results.

Below is a chart that SEOwizz produced based Bn some analysis they conducted. They compared the top 2 results for the search “SEO Services” in Bing and Google to determine what factors matter most for the two respective websites.

As you can see from the general consensus and SEOwizz’s experiment, the top ranking factors for Google and Bing do differ.

The important thing to note is that none of them compete, so to get Top 10 rankings in Bing and Google wont compromise each other. Smart site owners should be covering off the factors of each search engine to maximize their website traffic.

If you’ve done your own research into what works and does’t work for Bing SEO – we’d love to hear what you’ve learnt.

Rene is the marketing manager of ineedhits.com - a global search engine marketing company. He also leads the marketing for Gooruze.com - a web 2.0 style community for online and digital marketers. Rene has been in the industry since 1997 with much of that time spent helping businesses embrace the best of the internet and digital world.

Discussion
(74 - comments)

Who uses Bing?

By
@23Kazoos - July 14, 2009

Great article!

By
Sammy - July 14, 2009

How to Get Top 10 Rank in Bing…

We have been largely posting the rise of Bing on this blog, and there’s no denial it has definitely improved Microsoft’s position in terms of search market share.So now the question for website owners and SEO’ers remains – “How do I rank higher…

After I read your article, no doubt some light is shed to the areas where I had not realized, but still, good thing is that found my site http://www.psexam.com to fulfill most of the criteria you’ve mentioned.

In practical ground I’m getting too little traffic from bing as compared to the google. Might be since bing users are less. But my concern is that my site does not appear at top on bing for those keywords that are on top in Google.

Something interesting that you may like to know re Bing, is that if your site is listed in DMOZ, Bing/MSN automatically uses the description from your DMOZ entry for it’s listing of your site in Bing….This can have a negative (or postive) effect on your rankings.

So if you are wondering why Bing isn’t using your latest meta description tag, try using this code in the section of your page(s) :

Interesting ideas here- I totally agree on your point about website age, but not authority- I think you’re inappropriately combing those two very different factors. Age is simply age, authority, however, is depth of content, relevance of information, and importance of that page for it’s specific subject- based on the number of, and quality of links pointing to it from other sites.

Age should definitely go out the window- it has nothing to do with quality whatsoever.

By
Tim - September 23, 2009

Interesting post, I have a site thats only about 1 month old and managed to get top 10 with two article blog on the key word ‘filipino’. How is that possible?

We rank pretty well on Google and Bing for our keywords. I think if you focus on good content around great keywords, you can’t go wrong. It was interesting to see the results from the test and how something like an H1 tag has different weight for each search engine. http://www.thegadgitech.com

By
Mike Peacock - January 5, 2010

Good Article, I have also noticed that Bing gives weight to websites that have blogs with regular updating content (at least 2-3 posts per week). http://www.OrlandoSEOWorld.com

By
Craig Heineman - January 7, 2010

Hi,

Thanks for the tips. I get a great amount of traffic from Google, but I will be lucky to get 15 visits a day from Bing. I seem to be using all of your techniques, so I am just going to hope it is because of the age (9mos old) of my site.

Nice post..but i think you should mention how to get ranking in Bing as this points are applicable to all search engine. Waiting to see your post on this.

By
George - January 20, 2010

we just updated our new website and now waiting to see if we get the desired results. Have followed most of the guidelines as provided here. do check http://www.dimakhconsultants.com and let me know your comments.

By
seopuneconsultants - January 30, 2010

good post.my website is doing great without it.Im ranked in top 10(www.shopping-plazas.com)

By
sherri - February 2, 2010

It my opinion Bing seems to be more stable in terms of SERPS ranking than Google. Also it’s clear that if you aren’t using the Bing webmaster tools then this will adversely affect your ranking in seo. Getting listed in Bing for a new site in their webmaster tools normally takes about 6 weeks in my experience

By
Titanium SEO - February 17, 2010

Bing still seems to favour more spammy domain names. My site: http://www.cambridgedrivingschool.net/ – keywords google: driving lessons cambridge, comes up number 1. in Bing using same keywords the spammy domain named site comes as number 1. Google seems not to like spammy domain names.

By
Richard - March 18, 2010

Even my site http://www.innatdelhi.com is not coming up in Bing. I will have to try the suggestions above & see what happens next.

By
Subhash - Delhi B&B owner - March 19, 2010

I have optimized my site http://www.siliconebrainserts.net but cannot seem to get it listed on Bing. Google sandboxes the site every so often but I am hoping after a few more months this will stop happening. Interesting. Thanks for the article.

Very interesting article. While some of these thing may remain true for Bing a lot has change.SEO is ever changing as some SEO companies in the industry abuse, misuse SEO strategies that they learn. Being natural is the key.. Bing will change as the Search Engine Leader changes. Now that Google’s new Indexing Infrastructure “Caffeine” is live, thing will change for all of us.

Hmmm, Just over one year on since this article. I’d love to see a re-post of changes since then especially since the injection of Caffeine from Google. I’ll check back for updates. This shouldn’t affect our ecommerce platform much http://www.storesuite.oo.uk (We’ll just have to adapt to change!)

By
Devereaux - July 19, 2010

I get 75% of the traffic from Google. Did notice that Bing traffic is picking up and has surpassed Yahoo search results. In the near future Bing will probable give Google some competition, they have a long way to go. My site is at: http://www.skintreat.net

Yahoo good work, a move in the right direction!!

By
Ismail - July 20, 2010

Yes, I got more than 70% website traffic from Google and now I going to local listing at Yahoo and Bing and hope to get good response.

Alex.DACOU.COM.AU

By
Alex - August 18, 2010

Hi, I am getting the same problem with my website http://www.ireadysites.com , it’s doing great on Google for keywords related to mortgage website templates and design, but Bing is quit hard man!

One thing I do notice (since the days of live), keywords in the domain name counts a lot at Bing.

First of all great blog, I can use this info to optimise better for bing now. I tell you something that is strange, my site ranks #3 in bing.com (when you choose to ‘show all’ results) but not in the top 30 when you choose ‘Only from United Kingdom’. This is despite the site being set to UK in Google Webmaster tools AND the main keyphrase being in the domain. Do you think because I use a .org extension bing thinks my site is American?

It is so much easier to rank in Bing than in Google. I dont get as many hits but its not to be neglected.

By
Dave - October 24, 2010

Please delete post with broken link thanks

Great post, i’m starting to see the real benefit in ranking for bing however it still seems that all my sites rank higher in Google. The only problem I find with google is that it’s not stable enough, rankings seem to shift too frequently. Bing doesnt seem to have this issue.

Very Very Useful post, I’m going to have to store this blog and keep it in my bookmarks for future reference!

Jere

By
Jere - February 12, 2011

Very useful post, but like most people have said here, I don’t know why my site hasn’t seen growth over the past 6-8 months. I’ve done alot of the tactics its talking about here and I haven’t moved up a single PR! anyway I guess I just keep plugging away. cool blog! I don’t know why my last post got taken off, weird!

Jere

By
Jere - February 12, 2011

First of all great post, I can use this info to optimise better for bing now. This kind of information is very useful and your website is crammed with information.

John, Owner
Over 50 Life Insurance

By
John - February 13, 2011

Nice to read your tips I will try it in future Thanks! & Regards!

By
online software - March 25, 2011

Hey Guys

My website keywords not showing on First Page so guide me how i boost my keywords Ranking on Bing first page.like (facebook application)..Reply me

Bing does seem to be on the rise. Personally, I like Bing Travel which can show trends in airline ticket prices and good for international ticketing because it covers many airlines. Hope to get more hits from bing on my site at http://www.jasonhector.com

How about updating your MSN profile so you show up in local results? That must help too.

By
Jason Hector - June 26, 2011

Thanks for sharing about bing algo. I have read lots about google but good to read about bing.

It’s been awhile since the original posting on this topic here. So the question still remains “How do I rank higher on Bing? Has anything changed significantly or have I missed something? I am currently ranking well in SERP for Google but not Bing. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.